WTF? what is there reasoning? That is just weird.... _________________LISTEN TO BLACK SABBATH
FM2CDJC Member #10
9. Thou shalt not kill. Unless some motherf****r is coming into your house to take your s**t! - The Nuge

They probably think that if you think you're likely to damage your engine by ingesting water, it'll discourage people from driving into it. I just read the bill and there are a couple of other little things that look like they were hidden in it. One of them is licensing fees for off-road motorcycles.
Here in CA, we've got some pretty goofy rules. Everything has to be CARB approved before you can stick it on your engine. CARB is some elite organization that seems to be a secret society that answers to nobody. _________________Nothing to see here.

The short version of this post is, "CARB is a pack of gibbering morons lacking even a tenuous grasp on reality." Stop reading here if you're in a hurry. The long version is below...

For non-Californians, CARB is short for California Air Resource Board. In concept, this ain't such a bad idea. In practice, it's a sham: CARB has huge enthusiasm for going after any form of engine modification (read "individual hobbyists and customization shops"), but little stomach for brawling with anyone else (read "local governments and big companies").

Stupid CARB Trick #1: In the early 1990s CARB passed an edict declaring that by 2006(?) 20% --- twenty per cent --- of all vehicles sold in California must be considered zero-emissions vehicles. Legislative reality set in and this edict was squished. When asked about their decision, a spokesperson said something to the point of, "We want to speed up engineering advancements." Uh... Y'all are in the business of protecting the state's friggin' air, not forcing unproven technology onto the state's roads.
To work from that point, let's start with a Ford EV project (I believe it was called the EcoStar) from the mid-'90s. The test vehicles worked fairly well: 200 miles on a charge is pretty good for an electric. The downside was the propensity for the damn things to catch fire while being charged up, and the battery itself: the cells used some kinda hot sulfur mix. Think for a minute about the havoc wreaked if one of these cars got creamed and the battery cells ruptured, spilling boiling hot sulfur across several lanes of traffic. Kinda louses up the whole concept of "protecting the environment."
And as much as I like Hondas, I don't want the Insight hybrid. It's a two-seater. Who gets strapped to the roof, my wife or kids? (IMHO, the Toyota hybrid is a joke: the mileage is no better than any other subcompact, and ---- judging by how they're driven --- gutless as a Trabant.)

Stupid CARB Trick #2: Another mercifully quashed idea was for all smog-testing stations to be equipped with $100,000 "treadmill" machines, in order to simulate actual driving acceleration. Not only would this drive who-knows-how-many independent garages out of business, but would put the cost of a test through the roof... Like, "Shall I have food this month, or shall I have the car smogged so I can re-register it?" My own hypothesis is that the CHP had a hand in killing that one: Considering the number of working poor in California, there would be such an upsurge of registration violators the CHP would have no time for, y'know, enforcing laws that actually protect the general populace.

Having moved from a place where the Environmental Disaster Sirens are tested weekly (and used a couple times a year; I've always wondered what the result would be if another fxxk-up at Chevron or Tosco happened by sheer coincidence at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, when they test the sirens: Would they drive around in big trucks with loudspeakers yelling, "No really! We mean it!"?), I can think of a lot of ways that CARB could better devote its time... But, like all government agencies, they know better than to Piss Off A Big Tax Base. And the rest of us can keep saying, "Thank you sir, may I have another?"_________________"Dude... That's a Honda."
"And you, sir, are very observant."
"You DROVE it up here?"
"Do you see a helicopter?"

The treadmill has arrived in the "enhanced" smog areas. I think I paid around $100 this past april for the chance to put the jeep on the dyno only to have it fail because of the fuel cap. Then I had to pay $15-20 for a new gas cap from the shop because if they unhooked it, they'd have to tell DMV I failed and that would cause all sorts of new drama.
A couple of weeks ago, the Governator's panel on streamlining gov't issued a 2500 page report (how's that for streamlining? ) and one of their ideas is to get rid of CARB. Of course the Sierra Club is enraged that such a worthy group as one that lives in a glass bubble and doesn't know what real life is like is endangered. Hopefully, CARB gets the ax and the Sierra Clubbers gas themselves with a garden hose stuffed in their exhaust pipes. _________________Nothing to see here.

The treadmill has arrived in the "enhanced" smog areas. I think I paid around $100 this past april for the chance to put the jeep on the dyno only to have it fail because of the fuel cap. Then I had to pay $15-20 for a new gas cap from the shop because if they unhooked it, they'd have to tell DMV I failed and that would cause all sorts of new drama.
A couple of weeks ago, the Governator's panel on streamlining gov't issued a 2500 page report (how's that for streamlining? ) and one of their ideas is to get rid of CARB. Of course the Sierra Club is enraged that such a worthy group as one that lives in a glass bubble and doesn't know what real life is like is endangered. Hopefully, CARB gets the ax and the Sierra Clubbers gas themselves with a garden hose stuffed in their exhaust pipes.

'
in kentucky we just dropped out VET (vehicle emmissions testing) testing because something like 1% of cars failed, now we can do whatever we want to our cars_________________94 Jeep YJ 3.5 inch lift 33's Tera SYE and CV driveshaft, More Sport Cage, BL/MML, rust